From John Mackin (1991-03-06): We in Australia have never referred to DST as "daylight" time. It is called "summer" time. Now, by a happy coincidence, "summer" and "standard" happen to start with the same letter; hence, the abbreviation does not change ... The legislation does not actually define abbreviations, at least in this state, but the abbreviation is just commonly taken to be the initials of the phrase, and the legislation here uniformly uses the phrase "summer time" and does not use the phrase "daylight time".

And so it has been.

If time zones were referenced with their full name, there wouldn't be an issue, but on *NIX systems, an abbreviation is returned.

Currently, the date command returns:

Fri Oct 12 14:52:43 EST 2012

This is correct, but is that abbreviation Eastern Standard Time or Eastern Summer Time? In Sydney, it would be Summer Time, but in Brisbane it is Standard Time. If you were arranging a phone call between those two cities and stated that it would happen at 10am EST, whose EST is it?

To get a more informative answer, use an -R flag to return a date that confirms the RFC 2822 format.

Now the output becomes:

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 14:55:47 +1100

To get a date that shows both the time-zone abbreivation and offset from universal time, you can use the following command:

date +%c" "%z

This outputs:

Fri 12 Oct 2012 15:02:03 EST +1100

From this result, we can see that the computer is in an eastern Australian locale that has shifted its time in line with daylight saving.

It's a lot of work, and I think it would be much easier to change the abbreviation to EDT for daylight savings.

Do you agree? Tell us your opinion in the poll below.

And then there is that other question: should we add an A to the front of our time-zone abbreviations to differenciate ourselves from American eastern timezones?

About Chris Duckett

Some would say that it is a long way from software engineering to journalism, others would correctly argue that it is a mere 10 metres according to the floor plan.During his first five years with CBS Interactive, Chris started his journalistic advent...

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Some would say that it is a long way from software engineering to journalism, others would correctly argue that it is a mere 10 metres according to the floor plan.During his first five years with CBS Interactive, Chris started his journalistic adventure in 2006 as the Editor of Builder AU after originally joining the company as a programmer.Leaving CBS Interactive in 2010 to follow his deep desire to study the snowdrifts and culinary delights of Canada, Chris based himself in Vancouver and paid for his new snowboarding and poutine cravings as a programmer for a lifestyle gaming startup.Chris returns to CBS in 2011 as the Editor of TechRepublic Australia determined to meld together his programming and journalistic tendencies once and for all.In his free time, Chris is often seen yelling at different operating systems for their own unique failures, avoiding the dreaded tech support calls from relatives, and conducting extensive studies of internets — he claims he once read an entire one.